So why in the world to the emacs docs simply refer to the file as
"init" throughout instead of saying ".emacs"??

GNU Emacs, I think, either loads ~/.emacs or default.el, could be the
latter has to reside in a directory ~/.emacs.d (or in load-path?) or
is meant for a world with files that don't start with `.´, could be
this all is only valid in some UNIX and only for GNU Emacs 22 ...